Feng Shui

Greetings,

Wind and water. And then she ran across the stream of broken stones. She drew in her book. Mind maps, star maps, life maps. She dreamed of new beginnings, new futures. Harmony. Balance.

This dream incorporated all her past present and future dreams. It was a simple village dream where a fan methodically played circular logic inside a rhythm of the saints, this blend of light, color, dancing children and escape from the tyranny of mystery inside and outside space.

Dancing ink. A well worn page of laughter on a hot, humid overcast afternoon in Amnesia. Amnesia is a chain of 17,000 chained green islands surrounded by clear blue sea. Life underneath.

Tartaros - Chaos. Primordial darkness. Cosmos birth. Gaia - Earth. Eros - Love.

The voice of water played forever. Be a rag and bone merchant of your heart-mind.

Metta.

 

Antonio Machado

Greetings,

A poem by Antonio Machado. Translated from the Spanish by Betty Jean Craige.

Walker, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is the road, the road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road, and turning to look behind you see the path you never again will step upon.

Walker, there is no road, only foam trails on the sea.

Metta.

You can't photograph a memory. - Henri Cartier Bresson

Bliss

Greetings,

Nature is what you can be. Culture is what you are.

Two French women arrived at the Blissful Guesthouse in Kampot. Kampot is famous for pepper, old French colonial buildings along a river flowing to the sea and packs of roving wild vicious dogs, mongrels and starving, desperate canines.

One said, "Hello." A traveler in the shade of waving sunsplashed ferns said, "Welcome to paradise."

"Is this paradise?"

"Paradise is wherever you are."

One woman with a cloud of white hair smiled and said, "You give us a great power."

"You already have the power. You are a light warrior."

"We can talk about that later." 

"I am a now, not a later."

They went to reception. There were no rooms available. They wheeled their bags away, through the sand of time discussing life's vagaries in fluent French, laughing at the absurdity of it all with innate existential wisdom.

Metta.

 

Make it new

Greetings,

Yes, well, he said, here I am patrolling another planetary manifestation.

It's a random act of kindness to find the "correct" letters to say this.

Some humans take themselves way to seriously. Hang around listening to some of the anxiety and fear and trepidation and...

To express the sensation. How do you express a sensation? Is it an expressed gesture, a fleeting momentarily lapse of reasonable consciousness? Perhaps a main manifestation of the young girl watering the dust. Now as sunlight filters through the palm trees casting long shadows, golden rays.

Did I ever tell you I am a dust collector? It's a fact. Of life. I've collected dust in many places - in Vietnam, in the Sahara, climbing toward Drepung outside Lhasa one brilliantly frozen morning, in Korla, a well known far Western crossroads oasis along along the Silk Road where yellow is the original color produced by the silkworm's saliva.

The swirling red January dust here in Cambodia is a sweet deep rusty red. The path is a watercolor, traced by bike and motorcycle treads, grooving new tributaries of passage. Walk softly as if your eyes are on the bottom of your feet.

Metta.

Black & White

Greetings,

I began learning and experimenting with black and white photography. It was about varieties of film, Tri-X, and later Ilford. Grain. Film speed or ISO in photog talk.

Then the learning process of working in the darkroom; developing, making contact sheets, selecting negatives to print, grades and quality of paper, using various chemicals. Developer, fixer, stop-bath, water. Emulsion. A negative holder, enlarger, light management, f/stops, and a timer. Expose and process the paper through the chemicals. 

Like magic, an image slowly appears. Looking for the contrast between shadows. Adjust the variables of time and exposure and play. Experiment. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of using color, or does color use us? The eye is easily fooled because it is passive. Cut through the colorful clutter and express yourself through shades of gray.

As Picasso said, "I just want to know one thing. What is color?" A pigment of our retina cone imagination.

After finishing the Sapa galleries I decided to do a project documenting my neighborhood here in Ha Noi using the small brilliant laser-like Leica in the B&W mode. 

No expectations, no logic. Keeping my blind eye open to light, movement and how they play. Do they play well with each other? That's a relationship question.

Some results were straight from the hip, the point-and-shoot-chance-is-all approach. No digital manipulation. Delightful. A dream dance.

A writer is lucky to get words down and try and make sense of them later. Same with making images. Here's to NOT making sense. Our brains have evolved to predict, establish meaning and detect patterns. Disorientation begets creative thinking. 

Here's the gallery.

Metta.